Six short Pro-life responses to Six popular Pro-choice slogans - Part 1

This blog was originally posted at my personal blog Mind the Evangelical here.

If one wants to be prepared to defend the pro-life position there exists a number of great resources from philosophers around like Francis Beckwith, Stephen D. Schwarz, Christopher Kaczor and Patrick Lee. Yet very few people who hold to the Pro-life view have ever perused their pages of their books, this leaves many of them unequipped to deal with some of the popular Pro-choice slogans and arguments that are often appear at first rhetorical powerful yet in reality are short on substance.

In light of this I thought I would very briefly in a few sentences respond to some of the most popular Pro-choice slogans and arguments. Some people might accuse me of attacking straw-man arguments, however in reality these arguments are both popular and frequently used. I'm more than happy to engage with the more sophisticated moral questions surrounding the Pro-life position but that is for another day.

1. 'It's a women's right to choose.'

Of course we all respect someone's right to choose, it would make you seem like a moral monster to deny something western civilisation values so highly. However, clearly there are many circumstances where the right to choose has its limitations. No-one is trying to tell women they can't choose what to eat or who to talk to but the idea that choice is absolute is nonsense. One must clarify what is being referred to when we speak about having a right to choose to do something. If I wanted to choose to shoot my dog or beat a child for fun you would likely be abhorred at the nature of my choice and tell me that I have no such right to do so.

Is It Acceptable For Men To Argue Against Abortion?

Even though I don't engage in pro-life campaigning, in expressing my philosophical views I'm frequently berated with the comment as a man I'm not allowed to have an opinion on abortion. Occasionally this is made as a polite suggestion, but the overall impression I get is that it is used as an anti-intellectual manoeuvre to try to shut down critical enquiry on this ideologically-charged topic.

In any case it is simply a ridiculous argument. Firstly it's an ad hominem. There's obviously no logical relationship between the individual who happens to be articulating an argument and the soundness of that argument.[1] Do you think that whenever there's an exam question on abortion all the males get an F even if they make the same points as the females? Moreover, it is inconsistent for those people who take this line (and I say 'people' because many men do too,) to appreciate the support that men such as myself give for the provision of education and other rights for women.

Abortion is absolutely not a woman-only issue. Every child has a father and half of children are male. Many of the doctors who are asked to kill babies via abortion are men. Sometimes abortions are even solicited because a male child isn't wanted (though this of course happens much more often with girls). And as Erin Manning has said, “By making abortion a 'women's issue,' we're playing right into the notion that fatherhood is irrelevant and that men should be free to have sex without consequences for as long as they want to- if pregnancy occurs, the woman can 'deal with it.”

The No True Atheist Fallacy

Atheism

I used to be an atheist. That doesn't necessarily mean I was a Hitchens/Dawkins (insert other religion despiser) style atheist, in fact I wasn't anti-religious at all. Yes perhaps I thought it was all a little silly but to be honest it was more out of ignorance than disdain for the religious. Coming from a single-parent, dysfunctional  and working class household I wasn't particularly well read and needless to say I did pretty bad at school, not because I was stupid but because I was lazy and was never really encouraged to see any value in education and learning. However, I considered myself an atheist because I didn't believe a God or gods existed nor did I believe in the supernatural which seems consistent with atheism. I have always been naturally sceptical and atheism just seemed rather normal to me. Although I never thought about it at the time (because I'd never heard of hedonism), I used my atheism to justify my hedonistic lifestyle because it just seemed okay because that's what everyone else in my friendship group was doing. Of course I'm not saying atheism necessarily leads to hedonism but it could just as much as it could lead to humanism.

Arrogance

Yet in the seven years I've been a Christian I can't count the number of times I have been accused of lying, since I couldn't really have been an atheist. I'm constantly struck by the arrogance of some atheists who seem to know better than I do about what I have or haven't believed in the past, rather than accept that people can move from atheism to theism. How dare people accuse me of not knowing what I didn't believe in. One does not have to be a middle-class, Nietzsche read, university educated, Starbucks sipping humanist to be an atheist, one simply needs to have the absence of belief in the gods and the supernatural! There is no atheist disclaimer that states only those that know the Origin of the Species from back to front or those that saw the light after reading The God Delusion are allowed to call themselves atheists. Perhaps it's that it's only some of the arrogant atheists (and atheist celebrities) on Twitter that define themselves by their lack of belief in the gods that feel justified in accusing those less read than themselves as worthy of calling themselves atheists. There is no qualifier for atheism other than that one doesn't believe in the gods or the supernatural, there are no books to read or prophets to obey, just the ones you choose. I'm quite justified in referring to myself as a former atheist whether atheists like that or not and in fact the more atheist literature I read the more I think I'm justified in my decision.

The No True Atheist Fallacy

What this amounts to is a variation of the no true Scotsman fallacy whereby anyone who once considered themselves an atheist but has changed their minds couldn't have been a real atheist. This is because from their perspective anyone that once called themselves an atheist should never become a theist, so you therefore must have been pretending, not properly understood atheism (there's not really much to misunderstand) or just using the story for some ends. This is all very strange since many (not all) atheists view themselves as being the champions of reason and logic yet fail to see the problem of their own erroneous reasoning which I demonstrate below.

No true atheist would ever become a Christian
You said you were an atheist and are now a Christian
Therefore you couldn't have been a real atheist

I suppose all I really want to say is that if you are an atheist please don't keep accusing ex/former atheists of not really being atheists to begin with. Firstly, it makes you look silly and arrogant and secondly, I'm afraid you better get used to it because I think a number of people are starting to see that ultimately atheism does not stand up to scrutiny. As a Christian I have to constantly hear about all the Christian de-conversion stories going around which I read and try and learn from so perhaps extend the same respect to former atheists rather than pretending we don't exist. Thanks.